Why Blindness Is More Common In Menopausal Women + What To Do

Close your eyes and pretend that you will never open them again. How would that affect you? If you could never look at the faces of your loved ones, read a book, see the colors of a sunset, or drive a car…what would your life be like without your vision?

Your eyes are not only the windows to your soul but also to your health. The hormonal changes associated with menopause directly increase your risk of blindness, and more than 65% of blindness occurs in older women—a sobering, but ultimately preventable, statistic.

Most women aren't aware that sex hormones have power outside of menstruation and reproduction. But in fact, they have more responsibilities outside the reproductive system than they do inside it.

You can see evidence in the brain and central nervous system1, which has more receptors for sex hormones than anywhere else in your body. The eyes are a part of the central nervous system, and so our sex hormones play a key role in eye health2.

In your fertile years, estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone bathe the specialized tissues of your eye. Their job is to keep the eyes moist, vital, and alive. But during menopause, the amount of sex hormones in the body decreases dramatically.

All three sex hormones work together to control our eyes' oil glands3, and one of the most common results of the drop in sex hormone levels is dry eye. Estrogen also affects the elasticity of the cornea, which changes the way light travels through the eye.

Women in their 40s and 50s are disproportionately affected by these issues compared to their male counterparts. They are also 12% more likely to experience vision loss than men.

Glaucoma affects the optic nerve at the back of the eye. Studies suggest that low levels of estrogen can increase a woman's risk4 of developing open-angle glaucoma during menopause.

Age-Related Macular Degeneration, or AMD, begins with the deterioration of the retina at the back of the eye. Macular degeneration gets more common the older you get and results in blurry vision and central vision loss. While AMD is not reversible, a healthy lifestyle focused on preventing inflammation can help prevent AMD and keep the macula from degenerating faster.

Thyroid Eye is associated with Graves' disease (hyperthyroidism), Hashimoto's (hypothyroidism), and the presence of high thyroid autoantibodies. The tissues in our eye sockets have receptors that are similar to those of the thyroid gland.

So if the thyroid activates, the eye sockets activate6. This causes inflammation in the eyes including bulging, dryness, puffiness, double vision, and vision loss.

Since the thyroid hormones and the eye are so tightly tied together, changes to our hormones influence the health of our eyes. A hypoactive thyroid can cause testosterone to drop.

Our vision is precious, but you may not realize how precious until it's gone. If you don't want to know what it's like to forget your loved one's face, miss the sparkling of light on water, or miss out on the beauty of a full moon, you have to be proactive about vision health.